blameless muffins

What could be more thrilling on a Friday night than to do a bit of baking, hm?

Yeah, I know.  It's just one more stop on my one-way trip to the Lonely Death of a Crazy Cat Person. But there's something about laying down a thick layer of margarine on the old brownie pan and pogo-ing around the house to Romeo Void that makes me think about Athens, Georgia's Muffin Lady, whoever she was and wherever she may be, and how I think she actually may well now be working at the NRO. 

See, when I first moved to this town in the late 80's, there was a woman who baked the bands muffins.  Well, muffins and cookies and little cakes and things.  She was a sort of forlorn figure in her lace-collared Laura Ashley dresses, a soft-featured, heavyset girl in a straw hat with a blue velvet ribbon carrying a basket.  When a band she liked would be playing a particularly important gig, a record-company showcase gig or an album release party, the Muffin Lady would quietly steal in between sound check and show time and leave a basket of muffins with a checked tea towel.

"Don't eat the muffins!" some wag would inevitably intone, as if these blameless-looking baked goods might be laced with rat poison or psilocybin or something, the implication of course being that the Muffin Lady was crazy, and might well take it into her head to poison your whole band.

I knew those muffins were just fine.  On the one occasion that my band was presented with our own basket of lemon poppy-seed muffins, chocolate chip bars, and miniature coffee cakes, I got a cup of coffee and tucked in with abandon.  They were delcious, and I was hungry.  I'd come straight from a day of waiting tables, and any of you who have worked in food service will know that special cruel irony that people who work with food all the time rarely get to eat, and if they do, it's standing up or leaning against a cooler in between rounds of side-work.  Consequently, you tend to rush around half starving all the time.

But anyway, I always kind of felt for the Muffin Lady.  She was an easy target for people's scorn in a town full of acid-eating hipper-than-thou artsy assholes.  I don't think anyone ever told me her real name.  Right after we got our basket of muffins, she moved away from Athens to I know not where.  I had heard that she was phobic of vehicles, which was why she was always out walking, trudging up the street alongside the traffic in rain, sleet, and snow, hat always angled just so that the ribbon would stream in the wind.  If it was true, then I don't know how she ever left here.  I think she may have moved away and then moved back and then moved away again.

Anyway, I do believe Wolcott has found her at last:

But by far the biggest loser of the 2006 midterms was NRO's Kathryn Jean Lopez, who made an idiot spectacle of herself with her birdbrained Rick Santorum cheerleading, the nadir reached when she posted that a Republican source had told her that Ed Rendell's internals indicated that Santorum was down on only four points. At this point a merciful intervention should have been staged, like the white coats arriving at the door to escort Blanche Dubois to that nice quite place on the hill where she can be helped…

Or rather it made as much sense as all of her other attempts to pluck silver linings off of the clouds floating in her head. Her political crushes–for Santorum and especially for Mitt Romney–have passed the cute Sandra Dee stage into a nattering form of erotomania. Her idol dethroned, she has floated the trial balloon–in fun? in earnest? who can tell with her?–that Santorum would be a nifty choice for Secretary of Defense once Rumsfeld sees the writing on the wall that reads LEAVE, GO, YOU'VE CAUSED ENOUGH DAMAGE, TAKE THE HINT, FOR GOD'S SAKE GO.  That's not as nutsy crazy as the reefer madness of Santorum on the Supreme Court, but it still gives cause for concern. It's time to roll her up in a carpet and stick her into the back of a van until her overheated if underutilized brain cools down.

God bless you, Uncle James.  It's true.  K-Lo does believe in Santorum Claus.  It's kind of sad, really.  She'll spend the rest of her life trailing around in the wake of a bunch of gormless morons who don't give a rat's ass about her, baking them cookies on their birthdays and secretly filling whole pages of her notebook by practicing signing, "Mrs. Kathryn L. SANTORUM!!!" over and over and over.  She's picked out names for their children and has even staffed and furnished a doll-house to enact her Li'l-Ricky-centered domestic fantasies on days when her medication isn't helping as much as it usually does and she has started to hallucinate palm-sized talking spiders crawling all over everything.

Cry for K-Lo, children.  Cry. 

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